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Is Putin Having a Brezhnev Moment?

Is Vladimir Putin having his Brezhnev moment? President Obama’s critics have made the Russian leader’s invasion of Crimea out to be a stroke of geopolitical genius, a move that has exposed America’s weakness and shown the Kremlin to be stealing a march on the once-mighty United States. “Putin is playing chess and I think we are playing marbles,” says House intel chairman Rep. Mike Rogers (R-Mich.). “Obama needs to convince Putin that he will not be outfoxed,” writes Ed Luce in the Financial Times. “If this were a tennis match, it would be the umpire shouting, ‘Advantage Putin!’” says Rand Paul. “He seems to be running circles around this administration.”

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But Putin’s gambit was much more impulsive than these detractors imagine, a recent story in the New York Timesreveals. The article, by Steven Lee Myers, says a lot about Putin’s remarkably insular and centralized decision-making. The decision to invade Crimea was taken very rashly on either Feb. 25 or 26 with the core Russian war counsel consisting of four people including Putin, his chief of staff Sergei Ivanov, secretary of the security council Nikolai Patrushev, and Aleksandr Bortnikov, the director of the FSB, the modern-day successor to the KGB. All, like Putin himself, are hard-boiled veterans of the Soviet security state—and are committed to some form of its restoration.

It was a remarkably similar group who made the Soviet Union’s fateful decision to invade Afghanistan in 1979. That foursome included Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev, his foreign minister Andrei Gromyko, defense minister Dmitri Ustinov and KGB chief Yuri Andropov. None lived to see the collapse of the Soviet Union, and Brezhnev was dead within three years.

The oft bare-chested Putin, still vigorous at 61, and his closest colleagues are not the doddering geriatrics of the late Brezhnev era, but it is interesting to note that these decisions were taken in the 15th year of Brezhnev’s tenure and the 14th year of Putin’s. While both leaders started with a wider and more diverse circle of close advisers, each man’s leadership team grew steadily smaller and less diverse. Brezhnev’s decision to invade Afghanistan did not cause the collapse of the Soviet Union, but it was a major contributing factor. More importantly, it revealed a great deal about the vulnerabilities of the Soviet system, especially the sclerotic thinking at the top.

No analogy is perfect, but my gut tells me that historians will regard Putin’s reckless decision to invade Crimea much like Brezhnev’s mistake in Afghanistan—as the beginning of the end. The Soviet system in 1979 had a much stronger foundation than Putin’s. The Communist Party was a very strong institution, and the leadership could trot out any number of achievements, from defeating Nazi Germany to achieving nuclear and military parity with the United States, to justify the system’s legitimacy. Most important, the communists’ tools of repression were far more powerful than those at Putin’s disposal today. Putin has failed to build any powerful institution in his 14 years in power. His principal claim to legitimacy and popular support has been the impressive economic growth Russia has enjoyed during his tenure.

Which raises his core weakness: Russia’s current economic performance. The most impressive growth—about 7 percent per year—occurred during his first two terms in power, 2000-2008. The global financial crisis in the fall of 2008, when Dmitry Medvedev was president, shattered Russian illusions of economic invulnerability, but growth resumed from 2010-2012 at a less impressive, but decent clip of about 4 percent per year.

Since returning to the presidency, Putin has managed to do what no Soviet or Russian leader before him has done, at least since 1973: break oil prices’ strong correlation with the country’s economic growth rate. Despite the fact that oil prices are around $100 per barrel, a relatively high level historically, Russia’s economic growth has stagnated to about 1 percent over the last year. If the oil price were to fall significantly, say to $80 per barrel or even worse, $60 per barrel, Russia would sink into a deep recession.

Most Russian and international economists believe that to revitalize economic growth, the Kremlin would need to make sweeping changes to the way it does business. The risk for Putin, however, is that all this would require major improvements in governance, rule-of-law, transparency—the very kinds of things that would shake the foundations of the highly centralized and autocratic kleptocracy that he and his cronies term “the vertical of power.”

This brings us back to the Brezhnev analogy. When Brezhnev was named general secretary of the Communist Party in 1964, the Soviet Union was still experiencing strong growth rates—although it is impossible to know for sure because of all the falsification and methodological problems with Soviet economic data. In a remarkable achievement, from 1972 to 1981, Soviet oil production in the new West Siberian fields grew from a little over 1 million barrels per day to more than 7 million, while the oil price increased more than four times.

But the oil boom obscured deep systemic weaknesses in the Soviet economy. By the early 1980s, even with this deluge of dollars, which funded an even more massive military buildup and Soviet military engagement all over the world, Soviet economic growth had stagnated to about 1 percent. The Brezhnev foursome never risked undertaking structural economic reforms that could threaten their political power, because they did not have to. The late Yegor Gaidar’s brilliant book Collapse of Empire documents just how completely ignorant Brezhnev and his cronies were on economic issues. The Soviet Union did not even try to keep a state budget!

Putin was never so clueless. When he first came to power in 2000, he moved quite aggressively on economic reform including on major land, labor, and tax issues. That reform impulse, however, came to a virtual stop in 2003, the fateful year when Putin went after the Yukos oil company in a bid to sideline Mikhael Khodorkovsky, a potentially dangerous rival—the watershed event for Putin’s consolidation of power. At that time, very rapid oil and gas price growth had once again resulted in huge windfall revenues for Moscow, and like Soviet leaders before him, Putin then discarded his reform agenda.

Brezhnev was fortunate not to live long enough to be forced to try to undertake deep changes to the Soviet economy, as his successor, Mikhail Gorbachev, eventually was. And we know how that story ended: with the collapse of the Soviet Union.

So how does this story end? It’s hard to say whether today’s Russia is on a path toward 1979, 1983 or some other fateful year in the country’s history. But Putin’s Russia seems headed inexorably for a moment of reckoning. The invasion of Crimea, and what it shows us about his narrowing inner circle, makes me think this reckoning will come sooner rather than later.

Putin’s behavior seems to defy logic. If he thinks this move would strengthen Moscow’s leverage with any government in Kyiv, he is wrong: Anecdotal but powerful evidence suggests that Putin is doing more than any Ukrainian politician to strengthen national identity throughout the traditionally cleaved country. And if he thinks seizing Crimea will promote his larger goal of reconstituting the Soviet Union for the 21st century, he is deeply mistaken: The recent statement by Kazakh President Nursultan Nazarbaev, a strong proponent of Eurasian integration for two decades, strongly emphasized the importance of Ukraine’s territorial integrity.

If Putin really understood how crucial economic growth is to his popularity, the Crimean caper truly makes no sense. Already, the ruble has fallen to historic lows—as of Monday about 10 percent lower than its nadir in January 2009. And by refusing to back down, Putin is virtually forcing the United States, and much more importantly, Russia’s critical trading partner the European Union, to take far more punitive economic measures than anyone considered possible.

So the only plausible explanation is that Crimea was the rash decision of a very angry man who seems to have become unhinged. He has a weak hand, and he is not playing it well now. Or, to use his own recent colorful laboratory metaphor, he seems to have backed himself like a rat into corner. Unfortunately, as the old adage goes, rats backed into a corner can be very dangerous and difficult to manage.

Andrew C. Kuchins is senior fellow and director of the Russia and Eurasia program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.